Top 10 business applications stories of 2013

This year, Fiat’s Ferrari division illustrated one approach to evolving enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems to fit new business imperatives: adding an element of customisation, using
Infor, to meet insurgent Chinese demand. Children’s luggage firm Trunki and online recruitment
company Reed.co.uk took a systematic approach to adopting cloud applications to meet their
respective business needs. Oracle declared more strongly than before for the cloud at its OpenWorld
event in San Francisco in October.

One popular article showed how organisations as diverse as DMG Media, the Northern Ireland civil
service, and Reynolds Catering are using enterprise software – such as mobile apps, BPM [business
process management], and ERP – to do new things.

Contrasting cases of the use of ERP to transform business organisations were LJA Miers, a
family-run company that turns rubber and plastic into gaskets and seals, and BAE Systems Military
Air and Information (MAI). The former chose SAP’s Business One ERP system, running on the
supplier’s in-memory database Hana, to re-cast its business. The latter is part of the defence
giant, with the complex organisational politics attendant upon all such large corporates, and awash
with ERP systems.

The South African city of Cape Town is also no stranger to ERP. Find out how SAP runs Cape Town
in one of our more popular case studies of this year.

SAP says it is taking its core ERP business with it as it moves to the cloud, goes mobile and
underpins its software with Hana. Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO at SAP, announced the general
availability of Hana on its Business
Suite ERP software at Sapphire 2013 in Orlando.

Talent management does seem to be a hot new area for business applications, with the cloud an
important delivery mechanism. Systems that enable a 360-degree view of the customer are also
developing and attracting customer interest, which is why SAP says it bought Swiss commerce
platform company Hybris.

Italian sports car maker Ferrari turned to Infor
ERP technology to respond to impatient Chinese and Middle Eastern customer demand. Ferrari’s
owner, Fiat, operates a centralised IT policy that says group companies should standardise on SAP.
But chief information officer (CIO) Vittorio Boero and his team took the view that SAP was not
going to deliver with the speed and customisation required for such fast-growing economies as
China’s.

Cloud applications providers have often entered organisations by the back door. The "land and
expand" approach is well-tested and has been used to considerable benefit by most of the leading
software as a service (SaaS) applications firms with the (albeit often unaware) assistance of the
IT department. Trunki and reed.co.uk show how more disciplined procurement approaches are replacing
the land and expand strategies favoured by pioneering vendors.

In a recent survey of IT professionals by the Corporate IT Forum, delivering innovation was revealed as the leading
operational target – indeed, nearly a quarter of respondents said it was their top strategic
goal. In tough economic times, organisations are looking to achieve a competitive advantage by
finding new ways to simplify processes, increase productivity and cut costs.

But while innovation is an important goal, delivering it is another matter – particularly when
day-to-day tasks have to take priority.

This feature shows new things done at DMG Media, Reynolds Catering, and the Northern Ireland
Civil Service, using enterprise software.

When BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI) assembled a team to conduct a vital
application upgrade, the company filled less than half the positions with IT people. Most of the
team came from business functions, rather than the technology department.

The international defence manufacturer, which is part of aerospace, defence and security giant
BAE Systems, is in the design phase of a project to upgrade and unify seven ERP systems. But large
projects striving to unify ERP systems can become victims of tit-for-tat battles between business
process owners who believe their way of doing things is best.

Aware of these potential dangers, John Booth, head of the project, brought people from the
business into the heart of his team.

LJA Miers, a family-run company that turns rubber and plastic into gaskets and seals, has chosen
SAP’s Business One ERP system, running on the supplier’s in-memory database Hana, to re-cast its
business.

Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO at SAP, announced the general availability of its in-memory database
appliance HANA on its Business
Suite ERP software at Sapphire 2013 in Orlando. In a wide-ranging keynote informed by Darwinian
evolution as a metaphor for business history, Hagemann Snabe said SAP had inaugurated three
“quantum leaps” in its own technology in recent years: in-memory data management; business
applications on the cloud; and an intensified focus on mobile users, often identified as a new
generation of millennial workers.

There has been technology in the human resources (HR)
area but, until recently, it has acted largely as an organisational hygiene factor. Businesses
needed good IT systems to carry out simple tasks, such as checking how many people they employ
and how to pay them correctly. But once you could do these things, technology did not offer talent
management processes with much additional benefit. Now this has changed and, as with other areas of
business, technology is having substantial and strategic effects on the capabilities of HR and
other business leaders with responsibilities for talent management.

Hybris CEO Ariel Lüdi said SAP bought the Swiss commerce platform company to move beyond
traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and enable it to deliver a multi-channel
customer experience, in-store as well as through e-commerce, to companies that sell goods and
services. In much of the press coverage surrounding the acquisition, announced in June and
completed on 1 August, Hybris had been labelled a CRM supplier. But this was a mistake, Lüdi told
Computer Weekly at an event in New York outlining the “vision” for Hybris as an SAP company.

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